GKIDS To Release The Acclaimed Anime War Drama 'Grave Of The Fireflies' On Blu-Ray This July
Grave of the Fireflies is directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Isao Takahata (Pom Poko, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya), with production from studio Science SARU (Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Inu-Oh). Based on the personal accounts of survivor Nosaka Akiyuki, Grave of the Fireflies is hailed as one of the most stunning contributions to animation and cinematic history. Deftly depicting the beauty of the human spirit as well as its devastating cruelty, Grave of the Fireflies is a singular work of art from Academy Award-nominated director and Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata. Get more details below!
Synopsis: When an American air raid kills their mother in the final days of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his 4-year-old sister Setsuko are left to fend for themselves in the devastated Japanese countryside. After falling out with their only living relative, Seita does his best to provide for himself and his sister by stealing food and making a home in an abandoned bomb shelter. But with food running short, the siblings can only cling to fleeting moments of happiness in their harsh reality.
Special Features
Feature Length Storyboards
Deleted Scene Storyboards
Interview with Director Isao Takahata
Interview with Roger Ebert
Promotional Video
Image Galleries
Teasers & Trailers
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CNET
2 hours ago
- CNET
Drag x Drive Proves the Switch 2's Mouse Mode Controls Are Fantastic
Nintendo's next summer title -- and one of the few new games for the Switch 2 soon after its June launch -- is the multiplayer wheelchair basketball game, Drag x Drive. It uses the console's new Joy-Con mouse controls to simulate moving the wheels of your chair (or vehicle, as it's referred to in-game) while playing short three-on-three matches. While it does take some getting used to, it shows off how well this new input mode works and harkens back to an era of motion-controlled gaming made popular on Nintendo's Wii. Playing Drag x Drive is unique, reflecting the Switch 2 new tech. You detach each Joy-Con 2 controller from the system, place the sensors face down on a surface (which can range from a table to even your legs), and slide the controllers forward and backward to move the wheels respectively. I actually found it more comfortable on my wrists to use the controllers positioned a little wider on my thighs instead of straight up and down on a table. Learning to play has a steep curve, and I found my shoulders getting tired quickly as the game kept reminding me that longer strokes would move my character faster on the court. For anyone who experienced Tennis Elbow back when WiiSports came out, Drag x Drive's bodily wear-and-tear will be familiar. Screenshot by Sean Booker/CNET The mouse's controls are good -- better than I expected, in fact. They feel snappy, and I was able to pull off some higher-level maneuvers when I got used to it. And as you move, you can feel a subtle vibration in each hand to help you dial in how much force you're inputting. Moving the controllers at different speeds will adjust the turning radius. Braking (by pressing the R or L buttons) can be done independently of each wheel to further your control. There are even tricks you can pull off by using breaking and lifting the controllers in specific combinations, which the game points out will help you perform more advanced blocks and interceptions. Controls are the big novelty of Drag x Drive and take time to get used to, though the court and game modes offer their own unique challenges. Read more: I Played Donkey Kong Bananza. It's the Switch 2's Killer Ape Screenshot by Sean Booker/CNET Moderately deep mechanics for a $20 game The primary mode is a 3-minute three-on-three game that's reminiscent of Rocket League (without the jetpacks). There's an indicator always pointing toward the oversized ball. Rolling into it will pick it up. If you're going fast enough (represented by a flashing light on your back) and crashing into someone head-on will knock it loose. And if you raise one of the joy-cons off the surface, you will lift the ball, flicking your wrist will make a shot. Since the court is kind of a skateboard-style bowl, you can even roll up into the air from the sides and shoot or dunk from above. These trick shots will award players with more granular points, for example, an aerial shot might award you 2.3 instead of the standard two you'd see in typical basketball. But you can still land a three-pointer from outside the boundary, but you'll have to be lined up real well while the other five players aren't slamming into you. Defense also works just like you'd expect, with positioning playing the most important role. Pressing the R and L buttons together will pass the ball to a teammate. If an opponent is in the way, they can intercept. This is key since I witnessed many teams pass a ball way down the court to an isolated player while we tried to race after them to stop the shot. Like every sport, you'll want to spread out and cover someone instead of clumping all together around the ball, like most new players often do. Screenshot by Sean Booker/CNET While Drag x Drive curiously doesn't refer to anything as a wheelchair (or even highlight the awesome and inclusive sport of wheelchair basketball), it's really wonderful to see this representation. The characters can also be swapped out for one of three unit types: defense, forward or guard, all with different speed and power stats. From there, you can customise your character's outfit and gear, with more to unlock as you play. Outside of the online play, there are also nine different bot difficulties you can take on, so the game is playable in single player. There are also several minigames stationed around the hub area. These include a timed race and a rebound mode where you need to chase after a bouncing ball in the hub before time runs out. They're pretty short and not all that interesting, but they will reward you with medals to unlock gear. There are also some obstacles positioned around to play with. 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Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
To know them is to loath them: Oak Park's Alec Nevala-Lee finds a niche, writing about science's biggest jerks
Luis W. Alvarez, physicist, genius, conspiracy debunker, military hawk, Zelig, University of Chicago dyspeptic, to cut to the chase, was not a very pleasant man. He was not especially liked by colleagues. It's hard to tell if he was even liked by his kids. And so, for Alec Nevala-Lee of Oak Park, who has become an underrated biographer of Great Jerks in Science, Alvarez was perfect. Nevala-Lee's previous biography was on Buckminster Fuller, architect, futurist, longtime professor at Southern Illinois University, but also an infamously obtuse, inscrutable mansplainer's mansplainer — his lectures seemed to go on for days. Before that, Nevala-Lee wrote 'Astounding,' a harrowing account of the men behind mid-century science fiction, particularly editor John W. Campbell, who could be described charitably as fascist. His next book, already in the works, is about those lovable scamps behind the RAND Corporation, the most despised think tank in history. Am I nuts or do I see a pattern here? 'No question!' Nevala-Lee said the other day, getting a little loud in his neighborhood library. 'I like intelligent people who succeed in one field only to try and apply those skills elsewhere and decide that they should convince the world that only they have the answer to certain problems.' At the risk of playing pop psychologist, I asked a natural follow-up: Is that you, too? 'I mean, uh… I it.' He smiled. 'Am I a reasonably intelligent person who thought a lot about where to apply their skills? Sure.' I asked this because he attended Harvard University and left with a degree in classics and an over-confident idea that knowing the classics was really the only way to become a writer. So when his fiction-writing career stalled before it could get started, he decided to reinvent himself. He developed a talent for writing quite accessible histories of the boorish. The boorish, but brilliant. As Nevala-Lee explains in 'Collisions: A Physicist's Journey From Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs,' his surprisingly breezy new history of Luis Alvarez, the Nobel laureate and occasional Chicagoan was pragmatic, for better and for worse. He preferred to work where his skills would get noticed by the widest number of important people — smartly leading to funding and fame. Alvarez had, Nevala-Lee writes, taste when it came to science. Meaning, eventually, after years of frustration in Hyde Park, he knew how to pick projects that 'were both achievable and important.' Which is an understatement. Alvarez learned how to position himself at the heart of the 20th century. He helped develop radar during World War II. He worked on the creation of the atomic bomb with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. He flew behind the Enola Gay as a scientific observer while it dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan. In fact, Alvarez's bubble chamber, the project that would earn him a Nobel, may have been his least publicized work: a pressurized chamber to help scientists study particle behavior. It was groundbreaking, though not as thrilling as proving — using a bunch of watermelons and a high-powered rifle — why the Warren Commission was probably correct about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In Alvarez's last decades, as if knocking out a little extra credit, he even gave us the answer to a mystery we all know the answer to now: He explained how a planet ruled by dinosaurs could go extinct nearly overnight. But … he was also something of a bootlicker. 'Alvarez knew how to cleave to power,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In a way I find interesting. The contrast to Oppenheimer is real, because Oppenheimer, equally brilliant, spoke his truth as he saw it.' He came to regret his role in creating nuclear weapons, so at the peak of McCarthy-era paranoia, his loyalty to the government was doubted and the head of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory had his security clearance revoked. Alvarez, meanwhile, 'was very careful about alienating people he needed to get stuff done,' Nevala-Lee said. 'In fact, and this is important, he doubled down and felt the solution to the Soviet problem was definitely a thermonuclear bomb. Alvarez would even become one of those people who was all for mutual assured destruction. Oppenheimer was not. Alvarez had such a high opinion of his own intelligence that when he sees someone equally bright, like Oppenheimer, opposing him on a fundamental point, he assumed it couldn't be he's wrong — no, Oppenheimer must be compromised. I don't know if he really believed that for sure, but I think so: Alvarez saw it to his advantage if Oppenheimer could be neutralized. He was causing problems, and Alvarez's work would go smoother if he was out of the way.' In the end, ever an opportunist, Alvarez testified Oppenheimer was loyal to his country, yet wrong on nukes. Not the profile in courage that makes for Oscar biopics. (Indeed, in Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer,' Alvarez is mostly on hand to say Germans just split the atom. Then he's gone from the picture. Alvarez, whose career was just getting started in 1939, wouldn't have been pleased.) To make matters worse, egads — Alvarez didn't seem to be a big fan of Chicago. Scientist Luis Walter Alvarez with a radio transmitter used in a radar ground-controlled approach system built to help guide airplanes to land. (AP) His ex-wife lived here with his ex-mother-in-law. During the development of the bomb, while traveling constantly between MIT and Los Alamos, he would call Chicago his 'decompression chamber,' but after working for a while at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, he felt rudderless and assumed all of the interesting science was being done elsewhere. He became something of a legend around Hyde Park — 'high on my list of mythological figures,' is how one scientist at University of Chicago described him — but Alvarez himself complained bitterly of his undergraduate education at the school, a place where, he said: 'Most of the graduate students didn't understand any quantum mechanics, largely for the reason that the professors had just learned it themselves.' He sounds, in many ways, I told Nevala-Lee, like the archetypal UC student. How so, he asked. Arrogant, awkward, questioning yet has all the answers; inquisitive yet careerist. 'I mean, that describes Alvarez,' Nevala-Lee said. 'I think of him now as someone who understood how to get things done. But he was abrasive, didn't treat subordinates well — it was a problem. He would have gotten more accomplished if people didn't feel personally attacked by him so much. He assumed if you were in physics at his level, you get this treatment. Can't take it, find another field.' Tack on a whimsical side — a study of UFOs, a study of pyramids, a genuine love for the science of the Superball by Wham-O — and Alvarez even sounds like a descendant of, well, Elon Musk. Nevala-Lee can see it. He was once enthralled himself by 'the American idea of visionary genius.' Nevala-Lee is 45 now, though younger, 'I had an exaggerated sense of my own abilities. I thought of myself as someone who could enter the world and solve its problems myself. Elon Musk was that guy about 10 years ago. I've since become pretty skeptical of this idea of a visionary genius. I don't know now if they ever did exist. Deep down, our figures like this, they all have the same problems.' By the way, since you're probably wondering, for the record, Nevala-Lee is a nice guy. cborrelli@
New York Times
5 hours ago
- New York Times
‘Fixed' Review: Dirty, Dirty Dogs
If you've been down enough medium-depth rabbit holes on the internet, you are likely to encounter the innuendo cartoon clip. Ren and Stimpy suggestively sawing wood, SpongeBob watching a gyrating anemone: It turns out, many of our favorite children's cartoons could be dotted with moments of perversion. There's a particular appeal to this kind of discovery. Adult animation has been booming for some time now, but finding dirty jokes nestled within the medium of children's cartoons scratches a particular itch. That comedic tension is meant to fuel the conceit of the animated raunch-fest that is 'Fixed.' Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, an animation veteran behind a handful of Cartoon Network shows and the 'Hotel Transylvania' franchise, the movie revives the 2-D animation style and vibrant colors of a 1990s cartoon, but plucks out any Easter egg innuendos for a full-on sex comedy. In a neighborhood full of neutered dogs, Bull (Adam Devine) is a 2-year-old pooch whose stones are happily intact. He takes pride in his surviving manhood, even if it's not enough for him to compete with the purebred crowd that includes his neighbor and dream dog, Honey (Kathryn Hahn). But when he learns that his owners are planning to neuter him, Bull spirals and goes off leash, running away from home and into the big city. Think, in other words, of an X-rated version of 'The Secret Life of Pets.' There is a juvenile pleasure to the idea, like the kind of glee you might get from spotting a dirty Mickey Mouse cartoon out in the wild. Tartakovsky has nicely captured the warm nostalgia of a bygone generation of cartoons in the movie's animation, and seeing it sullied with this kind of lewd mischief is briefly fun. But mostly the movie insists on sticking to a mandate of raunchiness. You get the sense that it's the work of an animator who, hampered for years by the constraints of children's entertainment, just wants to get wild after being given a green light. There are occasionally funny gags and a relatively robust ensemble of comedic voices (Idris Elba as a canine who's traumatized by the ghost of his mother's teats is the uniquely stupid bit that manages to land). But the film can't quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like 'Sausage Party,' Seth Rogen's own bawdy animation entry. Those old winking cartoon clips that resurface online make the rounds and make us laugh in shock. But that's only because they were rare moments that we knew weren't supposed to be there. 'Fixed,' though, can't help but go feral. FixedRated R for strong crude sexual content and language throughout, some drug use and violence. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
